Language Log has a good summary post about the latest in exciting linguistics publishing news:
As many readers of Language Log know by now, the editors and the entire editorial board of a major linguistics journal, Lingua, have resigned en masse, effective when their contractual obligations to their soon-to-be-erstwhile publisher, Elsevier, are concluded at the end of this calendar year. This same editorial team will re-emerge in 2016 as the editors and editorial board of Glossa, a fair Open Access journal to be published by Ubiquity Press.
Before resigning, the editorial team proposed to Elsevier that Lingua should become a fair Open Access journal: that the editorial board own the title of the journal, that authors retain copyright of their articles, that all articles be free to all readers, and that article processing charges be low, transparent, and in proportion to the work carried out by the publisher. Elsevier did not agree to this proposal, and insisted that they have the rights to the name Lingua. This is why the new journal will be called Glossa, but in the eyes of the community it is the rightful continuation of Lingua. Elsevier will try to start their own new journal, which they will name Lingua, usurping a name that has a lot of associated goodwill because of the hard work of the editors over many decades. We view this move as disingenuous and deceitful, and as a disservice to the field. The alternative name Zombie Lingua for the Elsevier project has been proposed, and we hope it will stick.
The main purpose of this post is to repeat and amplify these calls for community action:
Support Glossa. Submit your best work to it, agree to review for it, help it get ranked and recognized across the academy.
Do not support Zombie Lingua. The community should not assist Elsevier in standing up a new journal that usurps the Lingua goodwill. Do not serve on the editorial team, do not submit articles, do not review for them.
Or, as one of the commenters suggests, only submit articles to the new Zombie Lingua that are about the language of zombies. (May I recommend double-submitting them to @speculativegrammarian?)
Tag: Scumbag linguists strike again
But you run (or take) the risk that your results are merely tentative
Unless you base your corpus on a sample representative!Don’t try a demonstration,
Just register your name.
If not “I saw, I conquered”
You can always say “ICAME”.But if you feel constrained to have your grammar realistical,
Your particles based properly, your lexis authentistical,
Don’t rely on introspection, on the magic and the mystical,
Don’t hope to find a software pack of strategies heuristical,
Just build yourself a corpus (or some corpora) statistical!
Excerpt from How to Dispose of the Body, or The Corpus-Maker’s (Di-)Lemma by Anna Kerr-Luther
In other words, yes, it’s a whole poem about corpus linguistics. ICAME, for reference, is the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English.
(via allthingslinguistic)
Kimchi and Justice 